Introduction

Over the past fifteen years, the Czech legal system has undergone substantial changes. The ne1v social si­tuation after 1989 called for an immediate recodifica­tion of the entire system. Moreover, a significant role in this process was played, on the one hand, by the need to harmonize Czech law with the legislation of the European Union and its institutions, and, on the other, by some other European and worldwide trends towards legal unification. Numerous acts were drafted very quickly and often became grounded in past traditions or based upon only a cursory comparison with the legal systems of other countries. So far, it has been only the Constitution and the Commercial Code that have seen an entire makeover; the new Labour Code is ready to come into effect, while the legislati­on of other branches of law has been merely updated by means of amendments of existing legal regulations. However, such amended acts are no longer sufficient, particularly when one takes into consideration the fast development in the fields of technology and informati­on systems, the changing paradigms in economy, and the new social tasks and global dimensions that mo­dern law needs to increasingly address.